New Advances in Workflow, Efficiency and Quality for the SMPTE VC-3 based DNx Family of Codecs

The industry's need for better quality and bitrate flexibility, cost-efficient workflows, and performance optimization on common off-the-shelf (COTS) platforms has driven recent innovations in the DNx family of codecs that are based on the SMPTE VC-3 standards and RDD50 documents. Notably, the VC-3 codec has been standardized in the Interoperable Master Format (IMF) as SMPTE ST 2067-70:2024, offering broadcasters a cost-effective, standardized mezzanine codec that meets the DPP delivery specifications. The DNx family of codecs now supports tunable bitrates encoding to meet storage and network constraints while remaining compatible with existing specifications and decoders. Additionally, a new rate control approach enhances visual quality for low bitrate proxies, and a collaboration between Avid and Intel has led to significant performance improvements on Intel processors. This collaboration with Intel has resulted in new efforts to update the SMPTE ST-2019 standard to include these advancements.

Published

2024-10-21

Content type

Original Research

Keywords

dnxho, dnxhr, dnxgx, vc-3, st 2067-70:2024, imf, mezzanine, tunable bitrates, rdo, avid, intel, onetbb, advanced vector extensions (avx)

DOI

10.5594/MOO/3002

ISBN

978-1-61482-965-2